{"id":69515,"date":"2018-12-20T07:00:05","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T13:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=69515"},"modified":"2019-10-30T07:03:08","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T12:03:08","slug":"a-for-face-c-for-premise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=69515","title":{"rendered":"A For Facts, C+ For Premise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Williamson on – ahem – “Why Alexandria Ocasio Cortez drives Republicans Crazy”, and I’m gonna stop right there.<\/p>\n

She doesn’t “drive anyone crazy”.\u00a0 She’s a walking, talking testimony to the media’s left-wing bias; Ocasio Cortez actually\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>as vapid and ignorant as the media would have had you believe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann were, and much more extreme.<\/p>\n

No matter<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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Ocasio-Cortez, seen from that point of view, presents Republicans with a lot of things they despise \u2014 her far-left politics \u2014 wrapped up in a package that they very much want but cannot have. She\u2019s everything they want and everything they hate at the same time: Odi et amo, RNC chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel might well say.<\/p>\n

About those politics: Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist, a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn\u2019t seem to know what the word \u201csocialist\u201d means. She is a reflexive practitioner of identity politics, immediately suggesting that any criticism of her is racist or sexist or both. And she is an unapologetic authoritarian, threatening to abuse congressional subpoena powers\u00a0to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr<\/a>. for posting something mean about her on Twitter. An avowedly socialist practitioner of identity politics and social-media bully: that, and not her views on marginal tax rates, is what gets up Republicans\u2019 noses. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too, but he\u2019s a grumpy old Muppet from Vermont \u2014 a useful cat\u2019s paw to maul Mrs. Clinton, but otherwise old news.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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But Williamson notes there’s danger in making her\u00a0too\u00a0<\/em>much the figurehead of Big Left’s “Resistance from Above”:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a purely tactical matter, Republicans would probably be better off keeping Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer as their leading partisan archnemesis, inasmuch as neither of those candidates can deride the GOP as the party of rich old white folks without inspiring at least a little bit of a giggle.<\/p>\n

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may personify much of what Republicans despise about the distinctively millennial brand of censorious progressivism that currently dominates the Democratic Party, but, if they were smarter, they\u2019d be grateful for that: If this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer, then maybe the Republicans \u2014 no strangers to callow dilettantism \u2014 still have a chance after all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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She – and her elder sister in entitled identitymongering, Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren – are in that sense gifts to conservatism.\u00a0 Is the GOP – conservatism’s current vessel – smart enough to know what to do with them?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Williamson on – ahem – “Why Alexandria Ocasio Cortez drives Republicans Crazy”, and I’m gonna stop right there. She doesn’t “drive anyone crazy”.\u00a0 She’s a walking, talking testimony to the media’s left-wing bias; Ocasio Cortez actually\u00a0is\u00a0as vapid and ignorant as the media would have had you believe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann were, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,130],"tags":[289,406],"class_list":["post-69515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism-v-socialism","category-tc-media-bias","tag-kevin-williamson","tag-tide-pod-evita"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69517,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69515\/revisions\/69517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}